This Old Hiraeth

  I sat up on the roof with my feet dangling over the edge. I cracked a Mickeys big mouth, and took a long sip, lost in my thoughts. 

My dad used to sit up here some times.

 I was never supposed to be up on the roof as a kid, but sometimes I would sneak up here, and now and then I would find an empty Mickeys bottles tucked up under the eve. 

  I sat and sipped the beer, Looking out towards the road, but not really at anything.

I closed my eyes, but the scene was still there. I watched as a family of five drove slowly up what used to be a dirt road in a yellow 1960s Dodge Dart Swinger.

I could almost still see what it looked like the first time I saw it.

My parents bought the house when I was 7. We moved in on Mothers day, 1971. It was brand new when we bought it, we were the first people to live there, but we had all lived somewhere else before.

I was the youngest of three kids.

My family lived there, I lived there, it was rented out for a short time, then my mom moved back in. After she died, my wife, my kid and I moved in.

But it was nobody’s first house.

No one was born there.

No one was carried over the threshold.

There were no first time buyers.

It was however, my father’s last house. 

He was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Drove away one morning and never came back.

One of the renters had that in common. A falling tree crushed her while she was driving home from work, about a mile down the road 

It was her last house.

My mother took her last breath in the living room.  She had lived many places, but that house was the last.

My family had always owned it. 

My family, my mother, and then me.

The surrounding land holds the bones of at least 5 dogs, some 8 or so cats, a couple of hamsters, a parakeet, and a rat

I always said that once I moved in, I would live there until I took my last breath.

That when I moved out, it would be in a pine box.

But I no longer live there, not for over two years now, and I breath on.

As I write this it is in the process of being sold.

A casualty of divorce.

50 years of memories. 50 years of plans.

50 years of birthdays and holidays, 

50 years of not knowing exactly where I was going, but certain of where I would be.

A 50 year long con.

My Father said it, then my mother, even my sisters.

“This house will be yours someday”

No one argued

Our lives are made of constants, things we believe to be true.

The fibers that make up the thread of our futures.

We may not be able to see the cloth they will become, but we believe that the fibers are real. 

We have to believe, we have to have faith. We have to have constants, or the whole thing falls apart. 

Gravity, the speed of light, E=Mc2.  

Constants, knowns, faith.

That when you put the key in the door lock and turn it, the door will open. 

Until it doesn’t.

Until its not your lock, or your door, or your house.

“This house will be yours someday”

It was presented as a truth.

But, 

No one knew they were lying.

It was never mine; I was just allowed to pass through it.

I finished my Mickeys, and tucked the empty beer bottle up under the eve.

Then I climbed down off the roof, got in my car and left.

It turns out there is one truth.

To miss-quote Flannery O’Conner:

Where I come from is gone,

And where I thought I was going to, 

Was never there.